Oral history

The Rhine River: Vinland without its Map: "Too often the orality of old tales is dismissed out of hand -- usually with good reason, because the time between the usefulness of oral knowledge and the documentation is quite long, and too much time is allowed for new interpretations to take affect. (This can also be taken as a sign of genuinness: Genesis refers to customs and traditions that the biblical scribes could not have known about first hand -- evidence that the stories came from a much earlier era.)

The time between the events of the Vinland Sagas and their documentation is short -- just over two centuries. The knowledge within the sagas might still have been valid when they were written down. The sagas should always have been considered more authoritative than the Vinland Map. But the visuality of the map always made it more compelling, the orality of the sagas made them more suspicious."

(Via The Rhine River.)

Oral history is too often discounted by historians. Archaeology digs have been often offered as proof for land claims in BC, but oral histories are seldom accepted as legal proof. I suppose the phrase "hard fact" arose from our liking of concrete evidence, such as maps and rocks, not the soft facts of stories and legends. Considering how much of history is built on the study of words, one might think we would accept speech as a valid method of historical transmission. However, oral histories are not on carbon-dated paper. Literate cultures have a fundamental difficulty in understanding oral cultures.

Side note: that would be an interesting science fiction premise. How would a Terran literate space-going culture fare in first contact with a purely oral-based culture that was equally scientifically advanced?